No major innovations at CES these days? Nothing worth tweeting home about?

Hardly.

Justin Bieber showed up at CES this year to show off a dancing robot. If this trend continues, we'll get Lindsay Lohan at CES 2013 showing off a working jetpack with a built in iPad charger ... or something.

The robot, brought to you by TOSY Robotic, is also a portable MP3 player with 2GB of internal storage. He's called the mRobo though I prefer to think of him as the Bieberbot.

As the music plays the robot will grow a head, arms, and legs and start dancing. It's really the perfect futuristic toy for two-year-olds. Except that the speaker is positioned sort of weirdly (see above photo.)

"Not only do they have a great new way to listen to their favorite songs but they also have a new partner to dance to their favorite music with," Ho Vinh Hoang, founder and CEO of TOSY Robotic, said in a statement. All the cool kids will have one.

On a more serious note, it is interesting to see how the gadgets of the present future line up with the predictions of the past. The closest thing to a useful robot we have now is either a vacuum cleaner that looks like a squashed up version of R2D2 or SIRI, Apple's iPhone voice assistant. The ethereal quasi-AI can answer questions but can't do much more than that. And she sure can't dance - yet.

We predict the future by dreaming big, but sometimes the small innovations and the transformation of something like a phone into a portable computer are what really change the world. Dancing robots are cute but hardly as interesting or revolutionary as an iPad or Twitter.